and everybody couldn't help but know the woods
still spawned not only such as the tiny camel
emerging from behind a rock with its packsaddle and
the giraffe peering at him hermetically,
but boars with women's faces and other half-human mishaps
who had driven them, with the benigner animals, here.
An
ostrich clopped the gravel path, as though it called
the recent husband's name who rubbed his heel,
himself, his wife and child already duplicate
behind him, in a more developed home.
This scene between Lipari and the Sicilian coast
began to have the air of a scene recalled
in only the most eccentric of memories, as if
the sunrise hoped to be forgotten. Though
the life they built erased them, erases us, right now
we'd do the same, we'd make the world of making.
GOTTFRIED BENN
Quaternary
I
The worlds are drunk and drinking
to create new room,
and the last Quaternaries are sinking
the Ptolemaic dream.
Decline, holocausts, failures
in toxic spheres, cold,
still a few Stygian souls
solitary, high and old.
n
Come - let them rise and sink
the cycles are breaking out,
violin, age-old Sphinx,
and from Babylon a gate,
Jazz from the Rio del Grande,
Swing and a prayer,
by sinking fires, from the border,
where in ash all things disappear.
